George W. And Warren G.

by Michael Winship

The other day, a friend e-mailed me a column in which the writer said George W. Bush was the worst president ever -- even worse than Herbert Hoover.

That, I thought, was terribly unfair to Herbert Hoover.

Although he was in office during the 1929 market crash and the first years of the Great Depression, in many respects Hoover was, as the Delbert McClinton song goes, "a victim of life's circumstances." Striving to do what he could, he made mistakes -- big ones -- and was overwhelmed by a global financial crisis beyond his control.

His excoriation by Democrats during the 1932 election campaign and the subsequent FDR years created his image as monumental screw-up. But look at the life he led, not only as president but a brilliant civil engineer, the coordinator of European food relief after both world wars, the man who took charge of rescue efforts following the 1927 Mississippi River floods.

I know it's not the same as relying on your dad's friends to bail you out of financial trouble, owning a small percentage of a baseball team or mismanaging Texas oilfields, but give the guy a break.

No, if you want to find a chief executive with whom to compare George W. Bush for sheer ineptness, cronyism and kowtowing to special interests go back a little further in your history book to Warren G. Harding, the pride of Blooming Grove, Ohio.

Over the weekend, I was reading Samuel Hopkins Adam's 1949 essay, "The Timely Death of President Harding," and was struck by the parallels with our incumbent. "His one consistent policy was to get himself re-elected," Adams wrote:

"Of statesmanship he had not an iota, nor did he profess to have. He knew nothing of history, economics or sociology. He was neither educated nor informed. His oratory, of which he was proud, had a certain gusto but lacked originality, logic, and sometimes grammar. Intellectually undervitalized, he shrank pathetically from problems which he knew to be beyond his powers...

"He proved the most bewildered President in our history."

President Bush and his cohorts continue to irrationally spend and explode the deficit while insisting on the viability of further tax cuts, even though none of it makes sense. At least Harding confessed his befuddlement. "I don't know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter," he told a friend. "Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don't know where the book is and maybe I couldn't read it if I found it."

Bush, Rove and Cheney also would find pragmatic resonance in Harding's simple declaration: "I don't know much about Americanism, but it's a damn good word with which to carry an election."

But the realms in which Harding and Bush Republicans would find true harmonic convergence are the bending of government will to the desires of corporate America and the compulsion to stuff the ranks of public service with unqualified pals and hacks.

A September 30 Bloomberg News dispatch leads, "The ranks of political appointees in the U.S. government have surged under President George W. Bush after falling during the Clinton administration, sparking concern -- especially since Hurricane Katrina -- that career professionals are being crowded out of key jobs."

From Michael Brown, former FEMA head and designated pinata for the Katrina fiasco, to the recent appointments of Julie Myers to run United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Ellen Sauerbrey as head of the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, this administration has rewarded a favored, unqualified few with positions of responsibility.

Ms. Myers, who used to work for Ken Starr, is the niece of outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers and the wife of the Secretary of Homeland Security's chief of staff. The New York Daily News reported that "embarrassed Republicans and gloating Democrats" see her as "the poster-child for political cronyism."

Ms. Sauerbrey, currently the United States representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, is a former Republican National Committeewoman who ran the 2000 Bush campaign in Maryland. Quoted in Saturday's Los Angeles Times, Joel Charny of Refugees International said, "This is a job that deals with one of the great moral issues of our time... What qualifications does she have? The answer is none."

In the recent past, such folks would have been given ambassadorships to Pago Pago; now they're getting postings where they actually can do some damage.

The same was true during the Harding days: he gave his poker pals important jobs and they proceeded to use their buddy's largesse to gorge at a smorgasbord of bribes, kickbacks and profit skimming. The Justice Department was nicknamed the Department of Easy Virtue, its primary graft liaison a fellow named Jesse W. Smith, fond of bellowing a popular song with the refrain, "Good God! How the Money Rolls In."

As now, Big Oil was a player -- the Teapot Dome scandal was all about leasing public oil fields to petroleum companies in exchange for loans that made Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall a wealthy man -- until 1931, when he became the first cabinet member to go to prison.

Harding's Ohio Gang of reprobates made their Washington headquarters in a little green house at 1625 K Street. The house is long gone, coincidentally replaced by an office building containing the headquarters of some of the 35,000 registered lobbyists who now inhabit the capital, a number that has doubled in the years since Bush took office.

The Washington Post noted Monday that the White House and Congress, under the leadership of the now twice-indicted Tom DeLay, blurred "the line between lawmakers and lobbyists so that lobbyists are now considered partners of politicians and not merely pleaders -- especially if they once worked for Republicans on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers-turned-corporate lobbyists... remain among the most influential figures on Capitol Hill -- often more involved than lawmakers in writing policy and plotting political strategy."

Punishment, shakedown and reward are standard procedure at the GOP's K Street Project. Under threat, lobbying and law firms, corporations and trade groups are pressured to hire party loyalists. Corporate lobbyists routinely head fundraising committees for members of Congress.

According to a study released Monday by the Center for Public Integrity, "Lobbyists have served as treasurers for at least 800 political action committees and 68 campaign committees in the past six years... In that time these committees have spent more than $525 million to influence the political process. In other words, these lobbyist-led committees spent more money than President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry raised in combined contributions during the 2004 presidential campaign."

Out of this culture come the new, acting House majority leader Roy Blunt, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff -- all as much a part of the pay-for-play game as DeLay. Abramoff, who bragged of his connections with DeLay and Karl Rove, is the Zelig of Washington, his heavy hand detected in everything from bamboozling Indian casinos to promises of influence in the White House to a Mafia-style hit in Florida.

Already indicted for wire fraud and conspiracy, Abramoff remains the focus of a massive investigation spreading throughout the government that has seen the arrest of White House chief procurement official David Safavian.

So, the house of chits may be tumbling down. In the words of Ronnie Earle, the Texas prosecutor whose grand jury indicted DeLay, "Corporate money in politics... has become the fight of our generation of Americans... It is our job -- our fight -- to rescue democracy from the money that has captured it."

Who knows what's next? Assuming he has even a shred of self-awareness, President Bush could soon find himself saying, as Harding supposedly did, "I have no trouble with my enemies, but my damn friends, they're the ones that keep me walking the floor at night."